ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION IN PHYSIOLOGY. 99 



iologists of all the world. It would be as reasonable 

 to accuse an advocate of the "three R's" of a desire 

 to make an orator, an author, and a mathematician of 

 everybody. A stumbling reader, a pot-hook writer, and 

 an arithmetician who has not got beyond the rule of 

 three, is not a person of brilliant acquirements ; but the 

 difference between such a member of society and one 

 who can neither read, write, nor cipher is almost inex- 

 pressible; and no one now-a-days doubts the value of 

 instruction, even if it goes no farther. 



The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous 

 thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If 

 knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it 

 is other than a very valuable possession, however infini- 

 tesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowl- 

 edge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much 

 as to be out of danger? 



If William Harvey's life-long labours had revealed to 

 him a tenth part of that which may be made sound 

 and real knowledge to our boys and girls, he would not 

 only have been what he was, the greatest physiologist 

 of his age, but he would have loomed upon the seven- 

 teenth century as a sort of intellectual portent. Our 

 "little knowledge" would have been to him a great, 

 astounding, unlooked-for vision of scientific truth. 



I really see no harm which can come of giving our 

 children a little knowledge of physiology. But then, 

 as I have said, the instruction must be real, based upon 

 observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams 



